Just how much squelching is in 'Stranger Things 4'?

You there: How many times per day do you squelch? In your life, how often do you hear a person, place, or thing squelch?

I imagine, unless you live an extraordinary life, you hardly ever squelch. I bet you go days, weeks, or months even, with nary a solitary squelch. That is, unless you live in Hawkins, Indiana.

OK, yes, that is the fictional town from Stranger Things. But I contest that freaking town has more squelching than anywhere else. It is overrun by squelches. And other horrors.

Squelch! Credit: Screenshot: Netflix

Let me back up and explain. Typically speaking, I am not a person who watches TV with the subtitles on. But I started this season of Stranger Things with a family member who uses subtitles. And let me tell you, it's disturbing how often stuff squelches in Stranger Things 4. No spoilers but my guy Vecna? That dudes STAYS squelching. My dude squelches like its going out of style. He is a wet boy. Why so soggy? Why so moist?

(Some housecleaning: To be clear, we're talking about the sucking, wet sound definition of squelch and not the suppressing something definition.)

At some point, I realized I simply had to track how often things, or people, or murderous Upside Down beings were squelching in Stranger Things. Why did squelch come up so often? It's such an, ahem, strange word. It is an uncomfortable amount of an unsettling word. Was this all in my head? What was happening?

Now since I'd already watched some of the season, and I didn't quite trust my attention span to track it live — ohhhh something shiny — I employed a more scientific method. I ripped the code for the subtitles for each episode of this season, then converted it to plain text, which I then copy-pasted into Google docs. The results were sprawling, but searchable, documents, which meant I could find words, you know, like "squelch" or "wet."

My conclusion? This was, indeed, an especially squelchy, wet season of television.

Here's the data:

• Total number of squelches: 11, which is an average of 1.57 squelches per episode

• Total number of wets: 20, which is an average of 2.86 wets per episode.

Sure, that might not seem like a ton of squelching at face value. But I'd argue more 1.5 squelches per episode (SPE) is ludicrous. There's likely no television show on air right now that even approaches that SPE. Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! comes to mind as a potential competitor — with its gross-out food noises — but that show ended years ago. Stranger Things has a level of wetness and goo other programs simply cannot compete against.

Let's really dig into to the data. Here, I made some truly stupid charts.

Episode 1 was the squelchiest. Credit: Mashable / Tim Marcin / Datawrapper

As you can see, we were off to a blazing hot start for squelching. Four total squelches in Episode 1. That's Michael Jordan numbers. A spitball squelched. So did a body, mid-disfigurement. The end of the episode was a freaking wet squelch.

Although none of the other six episodes approached such squelch heights, I do hold out hope for the final two episodes set to drop in July. Episode 6 was an all-time low with no squelching at all. What a shame.

Now here's a chart for the wets.

Credit: Mashable / Tim Marcin / Datawrapper

As this chart shows, each episode of Stranger Things this season has been exceptionally moist. Things are soggy in Hawkins. What's so wet, exactly? Here are some of the wet subtitles that stood out:

• flesh distending wetly

• food plopping wetly

• demogorgon feeding wetly

• wet squelching (a fantastic combo, in my opinion)

• creatures biting wetly

Now, again this might seem like I'm overestimating the oddness of the squelching. But because I am nothing if not a dedicated, high-minded journalist, I looked into it a bit further. I downloaded this dataset of the 333,000 most common words, per the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus. Squelch was used about as much as words like cordero or starfighter. Squelching, meanwhile, was used about as much as words like pufferfish or optionale. The most common word used — the — appeared more than 23 billion times while squelch was around 220,000.

I'm not the first person to notice Stranger Things' subtitles are pretty gross. Den of Geek, for instance, wrote about it. Folks online have even noticed how often squelching comes up, just like me.

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It's just such a gross, weird word, and then you see "wet squelch" and things get even more unsettling. It's hard to miss. And, as the data shows, it's a part of pretty much every moist-as-hell episode. So ahead of Season 4's conclusion in July, we might not know what happens to our pals in Hawkins. But we can be pretty sure of one thing: There will be squelch.